How we built our Facebook chatbot: What does it do and what’s the point?

Later this year, Econsultancy is hosting a new event that will investigate how AI is impacting marketing.

As well as looking at how AI will change the way marketers implement CRM and content personalisation, the agenda at Supercharged also includes a few talks on chatbots.

This inspired us to launch our own Facebook Messenger chatbot to offer people information about the event. The bot is already live – you can speak to it via our Facebook page or by searching ‘Econsultancy’ in Messenger.

As well as building the chatbot, we thought it would be useful to blog about the development process so that you, dear reader, can get an insight into how it all works.

We don’t have the resources in-house to build a chatbot, so instead asked marketing technology agency Byte London to build it for us.

Byte have previously built bots for Adidas and Just Eat among others, so are very much the experts in this field. As such we leaned on them heavily for advice on what our bot should and shouldn’t do.

Byte’s strategist Isabel Perry helped lead this project, which began with a meeting where we worked out exactly what we wanted the bot to do and how it should be articulated. At this stage I should point out that our chatbot doesn’t actually use AI. As with most bots, all interactions are guided by a decision tree with pre-programmed responses.